Waiting for the Storm to Pass

By Bill Johnstone

Two teenagers lured to the big city lights of New York and a corpse washed ashore on the waterfront of the Potomac River in Washington are the first visible strands that eventually weave a pattern of murder, money and power. It is the third adventure of investigative journalist Mike McCabe; the others are White Collar Option and Then Go Straight Forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Johnstone
• Release date: Jul 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301999903

Bill Johnstone

The author has been a journalist for more than 30 years and has taught the subject in the USA and the UK.He was born in Glasgow, Scotland and lived in London and Washington where his novels are set.He is an avid animal lover and a trusteee of a cat sanctuary in Somerset, England.He travels frequently between the UK and the USA.

Book preview

Preface

The police bent over the body which had been pulled from the Potomac an hour earlier and carefully placed on the sidewalk beside the boat moorings. It was raining hard, as it had been for the past hour. The wind lashed the channel behind them, beating the water into a grey hostile froth.

The Washington detective, his eyes slightly stinging, blew into his hands to keep warm then thrust them into his coat pocket. It was much too early and he was cold, wet and uncomfortable. He squinted as he inspected the corpse.

The body was bloated, covered in mud, oil and some form of river weed that had twisted its way into a grotesque pattern. Strings of grass had tangled around the top part of the body making it look as if they had been woven into a reed basket with a torso and head inside. The hair, which obscured most of the face, was matted with a mixture of blood and dirt.

Chapter 1

Mike McCabe, journalist, pushed the fridge shut with his foot until he heard it click, opened a bottle of beer as he walked towards the door of the cabin and then quickly climbed the stairs onto the deck. It was swaying slightly in the wake of a leisure boat that had just passed on its way upstream with its party of revelers in full swing. He could see them bopping in the distance to some indecipherable repetitive beat that boomed across the water. Dinner, disco, a few drinks and maybe something else, if one got lucky, were the regular fare for these London Thames party-goers. For him, that time had long gone. He hadn’t the energy, the inclination or even the appetite anymore. He’d mellowed or maybe just matured. He’d like to think there was some acceptable excuse. Probably he’d just got lazy.

His beer tasted good though, but nothing quite as wonderful as the first swig. It didn’t matter how enticing the flavor, he couldn’t savor it for too long anyway. Duty called; a thankless, tedious chore he’d been putting off for days. He was running out of time. He had to tackle it soon. Below were years of his life in pictures, paintings, ill-fitting clothes, statues, pottery and a host of other memorabilia and bric-a-brac that he needed to sort, destined either for the storage depot or to be dumped outside the local charity shop for an undetermined fate. It would have been much more efficient to sling the whole lot into the nearest garbage bin. But he hadn’t the courage.

He was leaving London to return to Washington, as the US editor-at-large for the London Daily Herald. As a consequence, most of his belongings would be packed into boxes and placed in some featureless container for months, maybe years. He wondered if the ghosts that came with them could be shut up as easily. He’d long ago decided to only take the bare essentials with him. The walls of his new home would be blank, not encumbered by memories of the past, no matter how pleasant; a blank canvas to match a new challenge in the new world, an unimpeded vista not cluttered by what had gone before. At least that was the theory.

The move would be good but not without cost; the immediate casualty was his home. The barge had been his for more than two years now, in the wake of an acrimonious divorce that had left him embittered and almost bankrupt. It seemed fitting that he’d managed to buy the barge which, but a short time before, had been salvaged from the scrapheap. There was more than a passing similarity between their destinies. At that time he was salvaging what was left of his life, a tattered wreck, barely afloat and a shadow of what it had once been. It was as if they would console each other as they each embraced a new life. It was almost poetic, or something similar. He liked to think so.

His friend, who’d rescued it, had a vision of the boat restored to its former glory. It was a romantic cliché. But a coal barge didn’t have a former glory; it had a grubby past of dust and toil. In the end, the restoration didn’t happen. His friend had no money and sold the barge with the dream. Its fate with McCabe wasn’t too different. He didn’t have any money either. In time he sold the vision to an enthusiastic bank manager.

Sergeant Pepper, as it was to be called, rose out of that chaos and near penury, funded by loans and promises. With those financial props, he and the barge had started a new life together, where the dream would take shape, albeit a little slowly. They both limped into a new life, reborn.

In those two years, they’d made some progress. The boat had been transformed from the working carcass of decades earlier to become part of an idyllic nautical community on the banks of Chelsea, flanked by opulent multi-million dollar properties. It was a curious new role for the coal transporter and the others of this motley collection of floating homes whose owners were equally eccentric. His world had changed too. He was now part of a decadent enclave, tucked away on the shores of some of the best addresses in south west London; a bohemian rhapsody and the envy of many an onlooker. It was a new life.

Now, his pride was to be rented to some young banker who would travel into London’s financial centre every day to pay homage to mammon. It seemed to contradict everything he and the barge represented; an alternative lifestyle, a freedom, a maverick option, isolated from the commuting masses, an existence well distanced from the burdens and excesses of decadent money brokers. Nevertheless, a young financial genius, a billionaire in the making, was going to be his tenant, wearing Levi jeans and designer tee-shirts in the evening, living in this unconventional world removed from the madness of his share-trading cash machines and the daytime cacophony of the stock exchange.

McCabe had warmed to him at their first meeting but he had to admit the rent money was the clincher. With that he would finally be able to give Sergeant Pepper the much-needed and much promised facelift and fulfill the dream.

He sat on deck until it was almost dark, save for the lights on the opposite bank reflecting across the water. It was an eerie time of day. The sun had gone; there was no moon; the street lights were just switching on, a reminder that it was getting late and his task still lay ahead.

A few beers later he was surrounded by open boxes, files, papers, photos, even more chaos than he’d imagined. How could he trawl through decades of memories and decide what to keep and more importantly, what to throw away; decisions which would rob him of them forever? He had to attempt to clear some of the mess. How far he’d get in the time left he didn’t know but he needed to try.

He picked up a photo from the smallest open box. Mai Ly stared back at him from below a fringe of the blackest hair he’d ever seen. The face was of an Asian beauty with smooth skin and a broad smile. He smiled back at her in his hand, her image carefully captured in a bamboo frame. He’d had that picture on his wall, above his desk for most of the time he’d spent in Vietnam. It transported him back in seconds. He was there amid the noise and the chaos. He smiled at the memory.

He couldn’t remember where he’d met her; introduced by someone who worked in his office, he supposed. In Vietnam there seemed to be an endless supply of people who knew each other, second and third families, cousins and cousins of their cousins that stretched into infinity. Where she’d fitted in to that infrastructure he couldn’t quite recall. It didn’t matter. Then it seemed easier to sit back and let it happen. There, events had a life of their own, almost predestined. What had been determined was already written; very eastern. All he knew was he was on supply, replacing the normal correspondent who’d gone home on leave for a few months. It was all part of his destiny; it was so easy to believe.

‘I want you to go to Vietnam,’ said Scott Edmunds, his editor. It didn’t come as much of a surprise. That was his style; without overture and certainly without discussion or warning. McCabe usually felt the urge to resist such edicts. Not so then. He didn’t say a word. His mind was instantly full of images; a traveler in pursuit of the exotic as if created by Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham; enticed by the lure of the orient. That was his excuse, although he did put up some token resistance which was never meant to be very effective.

Three weeks later he was there, immersed in a culture that blended its Asian roots with the recent influences of the French and the Americans. The croissant and Coca Cola mixture, he called it, and he loved it. He suspected someone would come along to make his Asian experience complete. He felt it was inevitable; an eastern echo that called his name. And inevitable it had been; he supposed predestined. Mai Ly was her name.

He turned the photo frame over to read the words on the back. It had been taken almost ten years before; a lifetime ago, an age. There was never any chance of him staying there or of her returning with him. She and everything that occurred was captured in a timeframe, a context that was forever set. It couldn’t be transported to any other place in any other time. It was as if whoever escaped its beautiful borders would crumble to nothing in any other environment.

But she’d transported him into a world so different from his own. It was one of strange smells, tastes, food, weather, clothes, habits, people and colors. There, his six-foot frame seemed to tower over everyone. It made him look and feel different. With his western looks, he found himself the focus of smiles, laughter, smirks, chuckles; the subject of curiosity and discussion, a celebrity. Ironically, as he craved their eastern culture, they seemed to make every effort to go in the opposite direction. Invariably, they met somewhere in between, a middle ground that still kept him at arms-length, still very much the foreigner.

He smiled as he picked up the pair of chopsticks she’d given him when he’d left; a symbol of one of their first meetings. They’d been in a group dinner and everyone had been given chopsticks except him. The knife and fork, that flanked his place-mat, cried out that he was different, a foreigner, and allowances needed to be made. They were embarrassed when he brought it to their attention. Hurriedly, the cutlery discreetly disappeared to be replaced by an ornate set of chopsticks. He’d almost forgotten the incident until she presented him with them on his last day.

It was not all he brought back with him. What was important was packed away inside him; more permanent than any souvenir; a lesson in living. It taught him friendliness, human warmth and dignity on a scale he’d never seen. It also exposed him to the brutality of poverty and nature. Neither could easily be tamed in that part of the world, where life was cheap and the ravages of weather and crop-failures proved devastating. He’d sworn he would never forget her, the lessons he’d learned and the experiences. Part of that was true but it was too easy to forget.

For the next two hours he waded through the contents of the boxes laid out on the lounge floor. They all told their own tale. He picked up another photo. It was from Eastern Europe this time, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Years before that visit, while barely a teenager, he’d been on a school trip to the region. They’d travelled by coach through ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ on the East German border in the middle of the night. It was the spookiest thing he’d ever seen, straight out of a spy novel. He could see the guards through the mist, the picture made even more eerie by the condensation on the windows. The guards with their machine guns and ferocious looking dogs were enough to scare anyone half to death.

Nearly twenty years later the scene was very different, with colors where he only remembered grey, and laughter where there had been depressing drabness. He looked at the photos of him standing where the Wall had been. That same night was also his first beer festival. He couldn’t remember the different types of beer he drank but the delicate nature of his constitution the following morning was testimony to the experience. He never could determine his favorite brew. They were all good. He lifted up the beer mug from the bottom of the box; a traditional Oktoberfest souvenir bought by drunken tourists in their thousands. For him it was much more. It represented the people he’d lived with, who’d shared their lives and misfortunes with him. He could hear the Bavarian drinking songs echo from the heavy glass stein. He began to hum one and mouth the words. He couldn’t resist swinging the mug in time with the tune. In an instant he was back there with the brass band pumping out its seductive unmistakable pulsating sound. His feet were tapping. Instinctively, he raised the mug to his lips. He could almost taste the beer.

He pulled out a small piece of brick from the box. At first it didn’t mean anything. Now he knew why it had been stored with the beer mementos; supposedly a piece of the Berlin Wall. They’d bought it after a night on the town; one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time. It gave them a good laugh the next day; that’s all it was worth. He chuckled as he threw it back into the box.

For the next few hours he was back in Canada, China, Hong Kong and Korea, reliving a host of assignments, through the photos and relics that littered the floor of the cabin. Four hours and too many beers later he’d had enough. He would seal up the boxes, pack them in storage and confront those haunting memories another day. He couldn’t make any decision what to keep and what to throw away. He sighed and packed up the boxes.

But in this new assignment he wasn’t a replacement. On his last trip to the US he’d found himself embroiled in the work of a child adoption charity that had been hi-jacked by organized crime. In the course of his investigation there had been three murders. The Herald had given him the time and the space to expose the horrors but he’d only touched the surface of a racket that had brought untold misery to dozens of parents, foster parents and above all children who, supposedly in temporary care, had been prevented from ever returning to their homes. His story had helped rescue some but, he suspected, it barely made any serious impact on this insidious scam.

He dreaded to imagine what lay in store for those who had not been rescued. That part of the tale lay untouched and those that benefited from this traffic still plied their sickening trade. There was more to that story, of that he was sure. But whether he would ever be able to scratch more than its surface or make any impact on a practice that was as widespread as it was sinister, he was uncertain.

The only thing for sure was that he would be flying back to Washington. The rest he would leave in the hands of fate or destiny; whoever felt compelled to intervene.

Chapter 2

An Air France jet from Paris touched down at Dulles International Airport in Washington just before four in the afternoon. The flight had been uneventful. The enthusiasm of one of its passengers, desperately pushing his way to the aircraft exit, and up the adjoining corridors to the main terminal transport, wasn’t unusual. He was impatient though, like dozens of others, desperate to see the end of a tediously long journey. Few who’d paid him the slightest attention would have seen the tension in his face, or detected a hint of nervousness as he waited in line to get his documents checked.

The Immigration official clinically inspected his passport and visa, scanned it over a unit on the desk then checked his computer file for any entries. He directed the traveller to the glass electronically-controlled fingerprint panel in front and the camera above. The passenger wiped his hands on a handkerchief and gave his fingerprints. He lifted his head and looked straight into the camera, trying to force a smile. The official was predictably deadpan. ‘What is the purpose of your trip?’

‘Business,’ he answered quietly.

The official seemed unimpressed, almost bored. It was only mid-afternoon but already it had been a long day. He’d been doing this since early morning. He stamped the passport, wished the traveler a good trip and called over to the next in line.

Behind a glass panel a Custom official, as a matter of routine, randomly inspected those waiting for luggage while a dog sniffed the bags that were being unloaded from the carousel. The passenger didn’t attract any particular interest. His details were already winging their way to some security database.

He grabbed his luggage and was at the taxi line in minutes. An hour later the cab dropped him off beside Union Station, the main train terminal in the center of Washington. He made a quick call on his cell-phone in the relative security of the concourse then walked the two blocks to his hotel.

He checked in quickly then took the elevator to the third floor. A package had already been delivered to the room. He tore it open, inspected the sheet of paper and photo it contained and slid them both into his coat pocket. He extracted a gun from the bottom of the packet, slid the ammunition cartridge in place and checked the silencer would fit. He put it back. It wouldn’t be needed, he hoped.

Thirty-five minutes later he was outside the station again. It had been refurbished several times over the past two decades. Once the pride of the capital, it had fallen on hard times before its multimillion dollar facelift. Now it was a magnificent specimen of stylish architecture and a must on the tourist circuit. The views of Capitol Hill from the station and adjoining streets were reputedly the best from any vantage point in Washington. He glanced at the Congressional dome behind him then boarded a bus to the waterfront to catch a tour boat downriver.

It was early evening when he arrived, a few minutes before the tourist cruiser left. There were few passengers. The majority were Japanese in one group. They chatted excitedly to each other, taking photos of everything and everybody and paid little attention to the other passengers. They hadn’t noticed him standing on the waterfront, or walking the entire length of the boat before boarding, as if looking for someone. Nor did they notice the other passengers not in their party.

Everyone boarded together, the Japanese predictably still chatting to each other. About half an hour later, only someone watching the other passengers would have spotted one on the top deck stiffening slightly and lurching forward as he held the handrail to keep himself